This is the sound of all of us

A 45 minute Case Study by:

Martin Burns

Slides from session

About this Case Study

This is the sound of all of us
Singing with love and the will to trust
Leave the rest behind it will turn to dust
This is the sound of all of us

The Wailin' Jennys, One Voice

Often we talk about the power of small, self-organising groups of people, working collaboratively. Lyssa Adkins gives a beautiful example of a string quartet in her powerful book on coaching on how the quartet members work together and communicate constantly throughout a performance. But music, like software, often seeks to deliver work at a larger scale and with more complexity than a single, self-organising team can manage. And it seeks to do so with unpredictable skill levels of the performers. What lessons can music teach us about the problems and potential workarounds of scaled delivery of creative work?

Using more musical examples than deserve to fit in 10 minutes, I will bring 40 years of musical experience and formal education from my first career to bear on the problems of my current day job.

Contains live musical and participatory examples.

About the Speaker

Martin is a lean thinker, improvement obsessive, recovering project manager. He is learning ways of introducing the best of lean and agile to historically skeptical enterprises through success, failure, dialogue and hacking people's heads.

He is a passable folk singer and a poor blues guitarist. Find him on Twitter: MartinBurnsSCO or his website.